iPaaS — Integration Platform as a Service — is a category of tooling for connecting applications and data without writing every integration by hand. Instead of building HTTP clients, retry logic, schedulers, and transformation code for each system, you configure connectors and the platform handles the plumbing.
Event-driven automation tools such as Zapier, Make and n8n target lightweight workflows triggered by app events, and are usually adopted by operations teams rather than engineering.
Enterprise iPaaS platforms — MuleSoft, Boomi, Informatica, SnapLogic, Workato — handle high-volume, governed integration with API management, monitoring and role-based access. Your integrations run on the vendor's runtime.
Open-source self-hosted tools such as Apache Camel and Spring Integration give full control of code and infrastructure, with no visual designer.
Code-generation iPaaS is a newer approach: design visually, then export real source code you run yourself. FlowSetu works this way — the output is a standard Spring Boot Maven project with no proprietary runtime.
The question that separates these approaches is what happens if you stop paying. With a platform-hosted runtime, your integrations stop. With generated code, they keep running because nothing in the critical path belongs to the vendor — which also means no runtime licence, and deployment anywhere a JVM runs.
Most enterprise iPaaS vendors price by runtime capacity — vCores, tasks, or operations — so the bill scales with integration volume rather than with how many people build integrations. Worth modelling against your expected throughput before committing, because that is where the long-term cost sits.
Related: MuleSoft alternative and MuleSoft vs Spring Boot.